Looking Up: Portola Skies

Looking Up’s silk pages are printed with the beautiful, changing skies of the Portola. Overlaid on alternating pages are excerpts of poetry in 3 languages that come from many sources: from Chinese immigrants detained in the Angel Island Immigration Station during the 1930s-1940s to excerpts from the works of Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman. Read together the sampled poem is one narrative for the Portola and speaks of hopes, dreams, work and longing for homeland. Grounding the skies in the Portola are fragments of Portola District landscape: old greenhouses, busy San Bruno Avenue and the water tower that crowns McLaren Park as well as vistas seen from the Portola-- Twin Peaks and the hills of the East Bay.